When I opened Worst Nodes today, I was greeted with these two error messages where "Worst nodes of the day" and "Worst nodes of the week" should have been:

Internal problem occurred in get_picked_nodes
You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that correspond+s to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ' 0, +1, 66, 1341080989 )' at line 7
Internal problem occurred in get_picked_nodes
You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that correspond+s to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ' 0, +7, 66, 1341080989 )' at line 7

A "page refresh" may yield the (apparent) result of clearing the error, but it doesn't have much to do with the underlying problem(s).

BTW, this is a complicated (by some standards) system. In a prior life, dealing with mechanical critters like airplanes, we frequently cited another truism: "Aircraft are complicated mechanical systems. Complicated systems break." With modest paraphasing, that applies here, too.

Yes, sometimes there are an annoying, troublesome, puzzling "quite a few" of them but, OTOH, the annoying, troublesome, puzzling "quite a few" of them could all get thrown because a single adverse occurance is repeating itself.

In any case, the keepers of the Monastery are aware... and are using their stockpile of (name your favorite insecticide) to try to stop any further repetitions.

The following information concerning last night's (for me - EDT) leap second bug, I received from outages.org:

Subject: [Re:][outages]Java apps around the globe are crashing...
Sender: outages-bounces@outages.org
Date: 06/30/12 10:20 PM
. . .
However, it does not seem to be a Java bug -- so far, it looks like
something is causing futex() to timeout, instead of telling the thread
to sleep [1], causing issues on anything that uses it (e.g., java,
chrome, mysql).
It's not clear exactly what variable (i.e., kernel verson, distro)
causes boxes to go haywire. It may just be a race condition which some
people hit due to bad luck.
But it is certainly related to the leap second.
[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/6/30/122

Checking our locations, many 1st and 2nd level ntpd servers are down. Following the thread, it doesn't seem that the same 'fix' works for every one. Some were able to shut down ntpd and restart, others had to reboot, and for some machines even after reboot, they aren't working correctly.

Our ntpd servers were not affected, but many source servers are off-line.

To sum it up, if getting a few error messages is the worst that PM has, I think the site did very well.